Saturday, July 30, 2011

Cleared: Hydrophobia: Prophecy

I just finished my play-through of Hydrophobia: Prophecy, and I have to say that I found some of the criticism of it to be over-harsh. (PC Gamer, for example, only gave the game a 39%, which seems way too low for my taste. (I'd probably rank this one somewhere in the low 70% range.) The voice acting is hit or miss, but the game does some really fun things with the water physics (good thing, too, as that's the game's whole point, really) and I thought the story was quite passable. I think the thing I liked the most about the game, however, was Kate, the player's avatar in the game world. She was tough and resourceful, but not fearless or stoic. She routinely says things like "oh come on!" when confronted by obstacles in her path and is obviously scared by the situation she finds herself in (who wouldn't be, really) but presses on anyway. She's also not some sexed-up barbie doll. Kate is pretty, but not gorgeous, and her clothing isn't designed for maximum sexiness at all. She dresses very much like what she's supposed to be: a systems engineer on a HUGE ship. I also give the story writing team props for not having her "handler" betray her, and the relationship between them was obviously a coworker-coworker one, rather than a strained or forced romance. The game was, in the end, genuinely fun, but it is very, very short.